A Horned Dwarf Warrior With a Rune-carved Shield — Print & Oil Painting

Almost nothing in this painting is lit. The ground is a dull violet-brown, the figure is a shade darker than the ground, and the whole canvas sits within a few steps of the same low value, so the subject has to be found rather than looked at. Two things emerge from it: a beard and a shield.

The beard is copper. It is the only warm mass in the picture, gathered into thick plaited ropes that hang forward over the chest, with a pale metal clasp at the end of one braid, and it has been painted with loaded strokes that stand up off the surface. Above it the face is mostly shadow, with a moustache, a broad nose and one eye catching a faint grey light under the helmet rim.

That helmet carries four horns, two great ones curving up and outward from the temples and two smaller ones set behind, all of them ridged, chipped and dulled to the same near-black as the metal cap between them. They break the silhouette in a way that is genuinely difficult to read at first glance.

The shield is the finish of the picture. It fills the right quarter of the frame, seen at an angle, its face a dark blue-violet plate bound with a heavy gold rim, and the rim is carved along its whole visible length with a row of straight-sided characters. At the centre, a boss of interlaced gold bands loops through itself in a closed knot.

The angular script on that rim is exactly the kind their smiths developed: an alphabet of straight strokes, made for cutting into stone and metal rather than for writing with ink, and used to record ownership and lineage on objects that were expected to outlive their owners. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same kit painted in the middle of a fight and the halls those shields were carried into.